People and organizations increasingly share and publish images, videos, and other digital content using social networking systems instead of print media or traditional broadcast television. Not only do friends, news organizations, and advertisers increasingly post and share content through social networking systems and other media sharing systems, but people often have more access to those systems through multiple devices connected to the Internet and other computer networks.
As one would expect, the amount of engagement (e.g., likes, comments, shares, views) that shared content receives is important to the users that share the content. However, conventional social networking systems provide interfaces with minimal flexibility concerning and control over increasing engagement with shared content. Most systems provide options for promoting or advertising content as a paid service only, which is not practical for most social networking system users. As a result, users that share content via social networking systems typically have very little data and very few options for maximizing user engagement with the content they share. For example, using a conventional interface for a non-commercial user of a social networking system, a user may post tens or hundreds of images from a vacation within a single post or individually post each image. That type of posting can overwhelm intended audience members with images or cause them to either ignore the content or selectively interact with a subset of posted digital content only.
Accordingly, conventional social networking systems suffer from limitations that prevent users from managing shared content items to optimize user engagement.